Hatchling

Research

Blue strands of hair fell into her vision and she deftly swept them out of the way. The thick leather-bound journal sat open in front of her, each page heavily adorned with her squiggly hand, each word melting into the next and her handwriting was almost illegible. She muttered to herself quietly as she flicked through the journal.

People were dying in her care and she couldn't do anything to fix it at the moment but she'd be damned if she didn't try her hardest. She flicked past a page detailing the workings of Moult and then to various other diseases she had painstakingly documented.

"Maybe it's similar to Pearl Rot," she muttered to herself as she flicked back to the page quickly. She hummed to herself quietly rapidly making links in her head. "Both seem to affect certain realm-dwellers more severely or less severely. Pearl Rot with End-dwellers and this new one with Nether-dwellers,"

"Discolouration in the skin-"

She had seen her father try to treat a nasty case of Pearl Rot, when she was younger, on an enderian around her age. It had caused a little more than half his skin to go white and his mother had died of it in the village as his family passed through. She could faintly hear her father telling her that he would most likely suffer memory issues and be unable to teleport again. He had said all this while shaking his head sadly, his dark brown eyes rippling with pain. Pain that he couldn't help him; she understood though, she felt the same pain when Shoulka had died. She couldn't shake the look of pure agony from her mind no matter how much she tried. It kept her up at night sometimes.

"High temperatures-"

Pearl Rot was only an issue on the grassy plains that acted as a middle ground for the other realms. She had spoken to another doctor, who had commented on how Realm seemed to affect the severity of the disease. He was passing through the village in search of a rare herb that could make childbirth easier or something, she was quite young at the time.

After some extensive testing, with plenty of trial and error, she had concluded that due to the unfamiliar surroundings whatever caused the disease fought harder to keep itself alive in the Grasslands, thus resulting in more severe symptoms and a higher likelihood of death or disfigurement.

Xi'er was snapped out of her thoughts as Terry crept carefully into the room. She blinked dumbly at the room, having never seen it in its cases of manic disarray, and carefully weaved through the multitudes of notebooks and ancient leather-bound tomes toward her friend.

"You find anything of use?" The blonde asked as she stepped over a stack of paper that looked dangerously close to toppling over. Terry looked at the journal upside-down her brows furrowed in concentration.

"No..." The doctor pushed her glasses up her nose and pushed a fairly thick stack of sheets with meticulously written notes on them for the avian to look at. "However I think I found some stuff that may be useful,"

Terry picked up the wad of sheets scrunched up her nose and squinted at the first sheet. Xi'er glanced up at her, waiting for the look of realisation that should have inevitably passed over her face but it never came.

"D'you not get it?"

The blonde shook her head in resignation and placed the paper on top of the stack, rubbing the loopy letters with a forlorn look on her face and her eyes clouded by a distant sadness.

"Well," Xi'er started slowly. She had thought that anyone with extraordinary enchanting skills would have been able to understand the contents of her notes but, she mused, not everyone would be able to understand complicated medical terminology. That or she couldn't read, which was impossible. "It states the similarities between a multitude of other diseases but I couldn't find anything conclusive,"

"Have you tried using Eucaly?" Terry shifted uncomfortably as something in the doctor's calculating gaze clicked with realisation. "I mean- it works against a lot of fungal infections..."

Terry looked, unnerved, at the completely enraptured face of Xi'er, she was staring at her like she was the next coming of Prime, and she could basically see some form of logic falling into place in her head.

"... but I think- I think that maybe... you ... might need the... nether version?" Terry said with much difficulty, sounding extremely unsure of herself.

"You think so too?" Xi'er said excitedly, her mouth curling up slowly into a grin. "You're smarter than I thought!"

Terry took that moment to furrow her brows in confusion and she tilted her head to one side. "What?"

"You obviously saw a pattern between all the patients," Xi'er had gotten up from her chair and began pacing the length of the office that was not covered in haphazardly discarded journals and notes. She deftly twisted her hair into a bun as she spoke, keeping it in place with a sharp, pointed stick with a red-flecked bloodstone at the tip. "All the nether species are affected less severely by this prime-damned disease and the stuff you pulled with the Soul Sand-"

Her blonde friend looked down at the floor and shuffled her feet awkwardly as the tips of her ears went slightly red. Her cherry-dipped wings practically turned into velvet blankets on her back with how puffed up they were. "I thought it was obvious..."

"Ah well," Xi'er threw Terry a wide grin and a cheeky wink. "Great minds think alike!"

She began to pick the books, journals and various bits of paper up from the floor and it only took a few half-seconds for Terry to follow quickly. In a few short minutes, the room was neater but not exactly tidy, the smooth oak wood flooring could finally be seen clearly without all the books littering it. The books themselves were stacked against the forest green walls or on a rich ebony bookcase, and dark oak lined the top and bottom of the walls. A few hand-drawn ink paintings of mountains and a few sparrows on a branch were displayed on opposing walls next to her desk. Those particular paintings were given to her by her cousin.

The peace was shattered by the desperate chime of the bell attached to the front door of the practice. The two women rushed out of the room, into the lobby, and were met with a gruesome sight.

Lin Chan Xue was being supported by a black-haired boy with a lithe swimmer's frame, her face was deathly pale, her black hair mussed up while falling messily around her face and her eyes unfocused. The lower torso of her hanfu was charred horribly and the wound underneath seemed dangerously close to festering, the angry-red mottled skin glaring out of the burned hole of cloth.

The young boy looked just as bad if not worse for wear, his black hair was plastered to his face and sweat dripped down his face despite the crisp weather outside. A poorly made tourniquet did no work in stopping the steady trickle of blood dripping off the stump, where his left arm should have been, and into his quiver, bloodying the three arrows that were in there. His arm had faint black lines contouring them and his face was grey and sickly, he seemed seconds off from dropping to the floor from sheer exhaustion and a bow hung limply on a broken and singed sling.

The boy grinned weakly, his shoulders slumping dramatically and his face, somehow, becoming paler. "I don't– I don't think we'll be able to get any new herbs for you in a while, Doc,"

He seemed to lose all strength as he collapsed. The boy wasn't given the opportunity to hit the ground as Xi'er and a small squadron of Azaleas prevented that.

A slight panic settled in the back of Hong Jing Xi's mind; her primary herb runners were injured and she didn't know how else to get the particular plant she was looking for. What was she to do now?